The Elusive Three-Paragraph Essay

An impossible format 📝

Blaise Pascal, seated at his desk. Engraving by Jean Bein after Hippolyte Flandrin (1844)

These days I just don’t have much time to write. I write anyway, because I’m stubborn and I’m going on a 200-week streak that I would be mortified to break. And also because I have tons of ideas. They just keep coming, the ideas. Unfortunately, most of them, if I want to do them justice, take time to fully flesh out. I keep telling myself I’ll just write something short, a clever point elegantly made in three paragraphs or so, something that is worth reading but takes very little time to either produce or consume. It never works. I always end up writing essays that are longer — and less clever — than I intended.

To be valuable, an essay must say something interesting, and to say something interesting briefly is really hard. There are a few reasons for this. Often, the interesting insights come from the writing process itself, so you have to write a decent amount to have anything non-trivial to say at all. If you then fancy making it short, you have to spend more time working on your essay. Thus, as Blaise Pascal¹ famously said in 1657, “I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” In addition, longer essays are often more interesting than brief ones just because a single, simply stated idea is rarely that original; the interestingness comes exploring its ramifications, or from surprising links to other ideas, or even from constructing a “vibe,” and all of those take time.

There’s still some value in stating ideas very briefly at low production cost, which is why Twitter is a thing. In that case the value comes from thousands of people generating lots of ideas (and jokes, etc.) simultaneously, so that the best ones can be selected and served to you. The ramifications can come later. But the point of writing an essay on a Substack blog is to explore a single idea a little more deeply; it wouldn’t do to write a tweet here, and neither does it work well to write three-paragraph posts. And empirically, when I look back at my post archive, the ones I’m most happy with are often the longer ones. Between a condensed essay that tries to be clever and just ends up being mildly interesting, and a majestically sprawling post that makes a heroic but ultimately flawed attempt at capturing the full complexity and beauty of an idea, I know where my heart lies. Of course, majestically sprawling posts take just as much time. There truly is no free lunch.

Blaise Pascal holding letters that are longer than he was hoping for, anonymous from the 17th century

1. And a number of later authors, as collated in this Quote Investigator article